The Risks and Realities of Being a Dissident

A Word of Warning

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The radical right is a lot of things. It’s exciting and transgressive; it’s historically significant; it’s one of the few places where ideas can actually be discussed. But it seems to only go so far, and stop just shy of becoming truly dangerous. This is partly because it has yet to fully escape propositional identity. Centuries of thinking that a man just is what he believes have made it hard for us to challenge the logical consequences of that thinking—modernity.

But the simpler and more immediate reason that the radical right stops short is that existentially challenging the system means maybe going to jail. And so, it tends to retreat back into safer challenges to the system like refining its ideology, redpilling normies, and content creation. Those things are all good, and we need to keep doing them. But they’re only a means. Twitter is fun, but it’s not praxis.

I am, of course, not suggesting that you do something stupid, or that you do anything at all. I myself did something—a thing that I thought was pretty innocuous. I just wanted to republish the Western Canon in a way that celebrated it rather than apologized for it. This was enough that I can no longer work a normal job, and that should tell you something.

So, I’m all in. Once in a while I get a kind of vertigo where it snaps into focus exactly what sort of life path I’ve set myself on. There’s no way back, only forward. I’m not complaining though—I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Sure, I’d be much “happier” if I were an engineer or taught at a community college or something, but happiness is for women and children; men need purpose.

But this purpose does not come without risk. There’s no dissident retirement plan. You might end up on a three-letter agency watchlist—in fact, you definitely will. You might even end up in jail. Your family might become a target. Your children might have to take up the mantle in your place. Unlike the left which represents no threat, we really are in the crosshairs of the system, and if we treat our scene just as a cool hangout that exists for the bantz (which it should be, in part), we can lose sight of the fact that the people who assume that risk are real men with real families who are putting their real balls on the chopping block.

This situation where a successful dissident creator gets “locked into” this career path has some unfortunate dynamics, one of which we can call the audience capture trap. Once you pass a certain threshold as a public figure,¹ you’re committed to it. Maybe you could go back to labour or something, but you’ll never go back to a white-collar job of any kind. You become dependent on your audience in a way a Ben Shapiro is not, and so, pleasing the audience becomes all-important because you have no other options to put food on the table.

What often happens is that a creator will hit upon a winning formula, some sort of a “hook” or a take that wins him engagement, and the disposable nature of internet content makes him lean into it. He needs to put out another video or article every week, but the audience will get bored if he simply repeats himself, and they’ll leave if he starts challenging them too much. So he will continually escalate his initial hook, making it edgier and more radical. If the creator goes too far down this path he can become completely captured by his audience, unable to challenge them, and tragically they will abandon him anyway since doubling down still gets old, just not as fast.

Once embarked upon, this radicalization path is hard to escape—only the biggest dissident media figures can pull it off, like a Roosh V who, to his credit, told 90% of his audience to piss off after he did a complete about-face. His profile has never been the same but at least he probably doesn’t hate what he sees in the mirror. And so, ironically, by creating a one-way turnstile into radical right-wing politics, mainstream society doesn’t actually help the radicalization “problem”, but they pour gasoline on to the fire—you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Ben Shapiro doesn’t have this problem. If PayPal bans his account, which it of course never would, he can just go back to being a lawyer. Can Thomas777 do the same?

For this reason alone, it’s important to support dissident creators with your dollars—they’ve sacrificed their life options for the greater good. And so, our scene must police itself and throw out people who casually bat around the word “grifter”. This word just betrays a non-understanding of the economics of dissident politics—anyone capable of earning a living as a dissident is capable of earning a much better living as a normie. If you worked for the CIA and wanted to lob the most destructive grenade you could into dissident politics, you couldn’t do any better than to lob into it the term “grifter”. Anyone who uses that term for anyone in our sphere needs to be dogpiled immediately. People who do this, do it because they believe in it.

In the quest for newer, hotter takes, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that you’re engaging with real people who have real families and have put them at real risk in fighting the good fight. The vast majority of the Imperium audience consists of good people who appreciate what we do and know on some level what kind of risks are involved. But it also happens regularly that people bluster about our failure to yell abrasively about their pet issue. I have no patience for that.

Spengler said:

A power can be overthrown only by another power, not by a principle, and no power that can confront money is left but this one. Money is overthrown and abolished only by blood.

There’s a lesson for the cuckservative and the dissident alike: things will only get better when you yourself are willing to bleed for it. The world is in the shape it’s in because the vast majority of men will tolerate shitty behaviour in silence. Some won’t, but at great personal cost. Think about that before you call them grifters.

1. A threshold that gets lower every day, and now is decidedly below the level of paying the bills.